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Memoirs of a Highland Lady: the Autobiography of Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus, Afterwards Mrs. Smith of Baltiboys, 1797-1830
By Elizabeth Grant Smith, Lady Strachey. 2022
Elizabeth Grant (1797-1885) was the daughter of Sir John Peter Grant, landowner, lawyer and MP, and mother, Jane Ironside. Her…
narrative describes intimate personal and family memories and observations on contemporary ideas and opinions, society and travel.“"If you have never read it before, do so now...compelling...delicious insights into a way of life long passed, as well as glimpses of the familiar...a warm, human, revealing account of a young woman's life."”If you have never read it before, do so now...compelling...delicious insights into a way of life long passed, as well as glimpses of the familiar...a warm, human, revealing account of a young woman's life. Scottish Review of BooksYellow Clover: A Book of Remembrance
By Katharine Lee Bates. 2022
This book of poetry, written by famous author Katharine Lee Bates, was dedicated in remembrance of her friend Katherine Coman.“Katharine…
Lee Bates (August 12, 1859 – March 28, 1929) was an American professor and author, chiefly remembered for her anthem "America the Beautiful", but also for her many books and articles on social reform, on which she was a noted speaker.Bates enjoyed close links with Wellesley College, Massachusetts, where she had graduated with a B.A., and later became a professor of English literature, helping to launch American literature as an academic speciality, and writing one of the first-ever college textbooks on it. She never married, possibly because she would have lost tenure if she had. Throughout her long career at Wellesley, she shared a house with her close friend and companion Katharine Coman. Some scholars have assumed that this was a lesbian relationship, considering some exchanges of letters sufficient proof, others believe their relationship may have been a platonic ‘Boston marriage’ in the contemporary phrase.”The Folktale
By Stith Thompson. 2022
The son of a farmer, Stith Thompson was born near Bloomfield, Kentucky...After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1914,…
Thompson began his teaching career at the University of Texas at Austin, later teaching at Colorado College and then at the University of Maine. Finally, he went to Indiana University, where he established his prominence as a folklorist. Thompson was instrumental in establishing folklore studies in the United States, legitimizing it as an academic discipline and placing it on a firm empirical foundation....Thompson gained international recognition for his writings, which were praised for both their scholarship and their style. It has been written of his work that "[it] is not dry, attenuated, dull, pedantic...for Mr. Thompson has...unspoiled direct appreciation of the zest and flavor of the best in traditional literature" ( N.Y. Times Book Review)."Thompson believed the folktale to be an important and living art, underlying all literary narrative forms. Most of all he wanted to acquaint readers with most of the great folktales of the world, not only for their own interest as stories, but as elements of culture. He writes about the nature and form of the folktale, gives an account of tales from Ireland to India, devotes a special section to the North American Indian tales and myths, and another to the methods of collecting, classifying, studying folktales as a living art. He found them rich and varied sources of entertainment and wisdom. So much is to be found in them, he said, that the talents of literary critics, historians, anthropologists, psychologists, linguists are all necessary. Study of the folktale involved 'more talents than one man can easily possess.' Stith Thompson came close to possessing them." --Los Angeles TimesPenultimate Words, and Other Essays
By Lev Shestov. 2022
This vintage book contains a collection of essays written by the influential Russian philosopher, Lev Isaakovich Shestov. One of the…
most delicate and individual of modern Russian critics, Shestov was a radical empiricist and proto-existentialist thinker who integrated literary theory and philosophical thought in a masterful way that inspired such minds as Camus, Dostoyevsky, Deleuze, D. H. Lawrence, and Bataille. Included in this collection are the essays: "Anton Chekhov", "The Gift of Prophecy", "Penultimate Words", and "The Theory of Knowledge".-Print ed.A Dream of Kings
By David Grubb. 2022
A DREAM OF KINGS is a novel of Civil War Days; an intense, lyric projection of Tom Christopher’s growth to…
manhood, and a deeply moving love story.Tom Christopher is an orphan, raised by his Aunt Sarah in a West Virginia river town. He shares a strange, lonely childhood with a girl whom Sarah Holmbrook has also taken in, Cathie. Through their early years these two children are sustained by their dream of a glowing God-like figure who never appears in the novel and yet pervades it—Abijah, Cathie’s father, who has told the little girl that he will some day return a King. As Tom Christopher grows older, he comes more and more into conflict with Cathie, he is possessed by a feeling so powerful and so agonizingly unfamiliar that he believes it must be hate. At length he flees from his aunt’s house, eventually to soldier under Stonewall Jackson, and through the violent months of war the redoubtable figure of Stonewall becomes one and the same, in Tom’s mind, with King Abijah. The Tome is wounded, and when Stonewall Jackson dies he deserts.Tom Christopher returns home, returns to find Cathie, and they realize they are in love and have always been. Because even Cathie has given up hope, finally, of Abijah, they have nothing now but each other...There are a number of things about this book that make it extraordinary: the strong flavor of the period and the utterly convincing account of Civil War soldering, the fascinating gallery of secondary characters like Aunt Sarah, the lyric beauty of Mr. Grubb’s prose. But the signal, unifying achievement is the emotional drive of A DREAM OF KINGS, the intensity of feeling that sweeps the reader through a profound experience."Novelist Grubb...has now attempted what might have been a commonplace story...but...he writes with such emotional conviction and lyric intensity that the book emerges as an authentic and haunting experience."—Time MagazineTall Tales of America
By Irwin Shapiro. 2018
This wonderful book is a collection of nine tall tales from America by renowned children’s author Irwin Shapiro: Pecos Bill,…
Anthony and the Mossbunker, Old Stormalong, Johnny Appleseed, Davy Crockett, the Yaller Blossom o’ the Forest, Sam Patch’s Last Leap, Paul Bunyan, John Henry and Joe Magarac the Steel Man.Illustrated throughout by Al Schmidt.El juicio de la historia: Los hechos frente a nuestro presente
By Jos Manuel Villalpando. 2017
Este libro se suma a la conmemoración del 150 aniversario de la muerte de Maximiliano y reflexiona sobre el momento…
histórico que México vivió en aquella época con un eco frente a nuestro presente. En este penetrante y documentado ensayo histórico se exploran los últimos momentos de Maximiliano como emperador de México, rastreando paso a paso el proceso que lo llevó al paredón de fusilamiento. Bajo la mirada crítica de José Manuel Villalpando, el reconocido historiador mexicano, esta obra profundiza y analiza el juicio que definió el futuro de México. Apoyado en un importante número de fuentes primarias, se examinan las leyes, los recursos y el contexto bajo el cual Maximiliano, al lado de Miguel Miramón y Tomás Mejía, preparó su defensa y fue juzgado y sentenciado con la máxima pena por el gobierno republicano de Benito Juárez. Más allá de la simple condena a Maximiliano por traidor e intervencionista, este estudio llena el vacío que prevaleció durante años acerca del total desconocimiento del juicio, incluso para los tiempos rebeldes y confusos en que sucedió. Entre las fuentes del libro también se comparten los argumentos esgrimidos por algunos personajes que intentaron apoyar al archiduque y persuadir a Juárez de su decisión de ejecutarlo, entre los que destacan el embajador de Estados Unidos, el conde Wydenbruck, y el escritor romántico Víctor Hugo.The Foundling
By Cardinal Francis Spellman. 2017
First published in 1951, this is the simple, heart-warming story of a baby left by its mother in a great…
cathedral in New York, and of the man who found it. Opening immediately after World War I, the story centers on Paul Taggart, a returned soldier, who had lost an arm in the war and who also carried on his face a disfiguring scar. It was at Christmas time that Paul entered the cathedral and there, in the crib, discovered Peter, the small helpless foundling who was to mean so much to him in the future…A compassionate, moving story.Messiah
By Gore Vidal. 2016
When a mortician appears on television to declare that death is infinitely preferable to life, he sparks a religious movement…
that quickly leaves Christianity and most of Islam in the dust. Gore Vidal's deft and daring blend of satire and prophecy, first published in 1954, eerily anticipates the excesses of Jim Jones, David Koresh, and the Heaven's Gate suicide cult.This book, which was first published in 1925, is a transcription of an informal account by Katy Leary of her…
thirty years’ service to the household of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), the 19th century American writer, humourist, entrepreneur, publisher and lecturer, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, who became world-famous for novels such as Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).It was Mark Twain who suggested that the faithful Katy tell the world all she knew about him. Her reminiscences were locked away in her memory until Miss Mary Lawton, who had known Mr. and Mrs. Clemens for many years, persuaded Katy to reveal them. Katy Leary began to talk and, pencil in hand, Miss Lawton recorded while the old servant poured forth the inimitable words in which she related many a chapter as yet unknown to those outside the family circle.A fascinating read.High Towers
By Thomas B. Costain. 2017
A magnificent historical romance chronicling the adventures of the fabulous Le Moyne Family of Montreal who became the heroes of…
French Canada and founded the storied city of New Orleans.“Beyond [a] brief record of [the Le Moyne brothers’] achievements and the vital statistics in the archives at Montreal, what is known of the ten stout brothers? What manner of men were they? Were they typical of the French-Canadian people of this early period, brave, resolute, devout, light-hearted?“To deal with them as characters in a novel, therefore, is a task approaching that of the scientist who tries to reconstruct a monster of prehistoric times with nothing more to go on than a broken rib and a fragment of jawbone. The result is certain to raise doubts in the minds of historians who are skeptical necessarily of anything stemming from the imagination. In my opinion, nevertheless, the only way to tell the saga of the Le Moynes, and to attempt the rescue of these remarkable brothers from the oblivion into which they have sunk, is to set down their story in the guise of historical fiction.” (Thomas B. Costain, Introduction)Tammy out of Time: A Novel
By Cid Ricketts Sumner. 2017
Have you ever thought how our modern world with all its artificial devices, its complicated ways, and its false gods…
would seem to you if you were suddenly moved into the midst of it after having grown up in the old-fashioned way without knowing anything else? If you could look at our world with fresh eyes, wouldn’t it give you a whole new perspective on life and help you to rediscover its true values? Well, Tammy, the lovable young girl you’ll meet in these pages, does just that.Before things began to happen, you see, Tammy had lived all her seventeen years on a Mississippi shantyboat. It was a very simple, quiet, isolated life she had had with her grandparents. But then, after Pete Brent was rescued from the river, things changed, and Tammy found herself at Brenton Hall, where there were some marvelous contrivances and concoctions and also some curious ideas and customs and ways of speaking. Life wasn’t so simple for Tammy any more. In fact, Pete’s mother, Professor Brent, Pete himself, the lovely Barbara, Aunt Renie, and Ernie (especially Ernie) posed many problems.But Tammy, a most unusual and most enduring creature, came through with flying colours. And her story—a warm, lively, engaging story—is the kind that makes you laugh aloud, perhaps stirs a tear or two as well, and along with the entertainment, brings inspiration, a fresh perspective through which you may find strength and a new peace of mind.A View from the Hill
By Cid Ricketts Sumner. 2017
THE FORTUNE TELLER TOLD HER—“YOU AIN’T DONE LIVING YET!”In A View from the Hill, popular author of novels such as…
Ann Singleton (1938) and But the Morning Will Come (1949), Cid Ricketts Sumner, paints a vivid picture of a woman’s mature years made rich by living life to the fullest in a series of brief essays on friendship, love, and finding new interests.A Woman of the Pharisees
By François Mauriac, Gerard Hopkins. 2017
Francois Mauriac, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1952, was famous for his subtle character portraits of the French…
rural classes and for depicting their struggles, aspirations and traditions. The Woman of the Pharisees, which was first published in English in 1946 and became one of Mauriac’s most accomplished novels, is a penetrating evocation of the moral and religious values of a Bordeaux community. In Brigitte, we see how the ideals of love and companionship are stifled in the presence of a self-righteous woman whose austere religious principals lead her to interfere—disastrously—in the lives of others. One by one the unwitting victims fall prey to the bleakness of her “perfection.” A conscientious schoolteacher, a saintly priest, her husband and stepdaughter and an innocent schoolboy are all confronted with tragedy and upheaval. But the author’s extraordinary gift for psychological insight goes on to show how redeeming features inevitably surface from disaster. The unfolding drama is seen through the discerning eye of a young Louis—Brigitte’s stepson—whose point of view is skillfully blended into the mature and understanding adult he later becomes.“Mauriac is one of the greatest novelists.”—The New York TimesA Life of Shakespeare
By Hesketh Pearson. 2017
‘You are a genuine soaker in Shakespeare, and have not read him as a task. You have him by heart.’—Bernard…
Shaw wrote in a letter to Hesketh Pearson.Before he became a well-known biographer, Hesketh Pearson was an actor. Few facts are known about Shakespeare, but with an actor’s eye and a supreme self-confidence Pearson has drawn a recognisable portrait of Shakespeare the man—even telling us the colour of his hair and of his predilection for black-haired women. The plays and poems are assessed in the search to discover and build up a picture of Shakespeare’s character. Pearson has included an anthology of his favourite lines and passages.The Road to the Open (European Classics)
By Arthur Schnitzler, Horace Samuel. 2017
This English translation of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Der Weg ins Freie” (1908) was first published in 1913 and is one of…
only two novels—the other being “Therese” (1928)—by the Viennese author, who was better known for his short stories and plays, including “Reigen” (“Round Dance”), known to most English-speaking readers as “La Ronde.”“The Road to the Open” tells the story of the aristocratic young composer Georg von Wergenthin-Recco who has talent but lacks the drive to get down to work and spends most of his time socializing with members of the assimilationist, artistically sensitive Jewish bourgeoisie of Vienna and other non-Jews like himself who enjoy their company. A love affair with a Catholic lower middle class girl, combined with the author’s authentic descriptions of the milieu, the arts, the psychology of love, and the anti-Semitism that was coming to dominate so much of life and politics in the Austria-Hungary of the time, make this novel a classic.“One of the most important, representative, revelatory works of Austria at the turn of the century….The best English version of the novel.”—Marc A. Weiner, Indiana University“In Arthur Schnitzler the two strands of Austrian fin-de-siècle culture, the moralistic and the aesthetic, were present in almost equal proportions. Small wonder that Freud hailed Schnitzler as a ‘colleague’ in the investigation of the ‘underestimated and much-maligned erotic.’”—Carl Schorske, author of Fin-de-Siècle ViennaA Glastonbury Romance
By John Cowper Powys. 2017
A Glastonbury Romance is generally esteemed the greatest of John Cowper Powys’s six major novels, the other five being Wolf…
Solent, Weymouth Sands, Maiden Castle, Owen Glendower and Porius. On its original publication in 1932, the late J. D. Beresford wrote, “I believe that A Glastonbury Romance is one of the greatest novels in the world, to be classed with Tolstoy’s War and Peace.” C. S. Forester regarded it as “one of the most significant and notable books of the century,” Hugh Walpole thought that, “with the single exception of Thomas Hardy, no English novelist of the last thirty years has evoked the very stuff of the English ground with the power and the poetry which Mr. Powys has at command,” and Sir Gerald Barry summed it up as “really a tremendous boo. It makes the competent little novels that week by week are hailed as ‘masterpieces’ look silly. In searching for comparisons, one finds oneself using such names as Hardy or Hamsun….In breadth, rhythm, and intensity A Glastonbury Romance has something of the mighty pantheism of Rubens.”Weymouth Sands
By John Cowper Powys. 2017
Drawing on his vivid childhood memories of the seaside town of Weymouth, author John Cowper Powys creates a striking collection…
of human oddities, through which he shows his deep sympathy for the variety, the eccentricity, the essential loneliness of human beings.“To encounter Powys is to arrive at the very fount of creation.”—Henry Miller.For My Great Folly: A Novel
By Thomas B. Costain. 2017
A LUSTY, BRAWLING NOVEL ABOUT SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PIRATESFore My Great Folly, which was first published in 1942, is the powerful story…
of a young scholar who leaves his books to join a pirate ship—and achieves manhood fighting side by side with the legendary buccaneer John Ward.Fore My Great Folly re-creates the fascinating era of English pirates who waged a private war with Spain in the seventeenth century.For My Great Folly was the beginning of Thomas B. Costain’s great career in historical fiction, and it remains of one of the truly great sea stories in modern literature.Below the Salt: A Novel
By Thomas B. Costain. 2017
His voice was cast in a lower tone but it still carried the suggestion of a lionlike rumble. “...I want…
to explain everything for reasons you’ll understand when you’ve heard. But not yet. This is the queerest and blastedest story that any human being has ever told; and every word of it true...It—well, it must be led up to.”The older man’s words were the first intimation aspiring young writer John Foraday had that something remarkably strange lay ahead. John had been mysteriously summoned by the aging U.S. Senator O’Rawn whom he had not previously known—But what had the Senator to say which must he ladled out, bit by bit, inkling by inkling?...Before John learned the full answer to this question, time was strangely rolled back 700 years so that he was hearing an account of those stirring, violent events in England and Europe that led to Magna Charta and thus contributed so much to the liberties of future generations; with a story as well, most of it straight from history, of a lost princess and the recovery of a lost charter.